Is Drake Good For Feminism?

Listen up nerds: It’s time to finally start a legitimate discussion about Canada’s finest MC and rap’s go to punching bag Aubrey Graham, more affectionately known under his stage moniker, Drake.

In case you missed it, here's Drake's auto-biographical opening monologue from his recent AMAZING stint as SNL host:

Via arntiawoman.blogspot.com

My man Drake has managed to really ruffle some public feathers since his rap career took off, launching him from the halls of Degrassi High into music's megastar stratosphere. Why the constant hate for Drake from almost everywhere regardless of taste preferences, intelligence, race, gender, or other identifiers? Well, he rebukes the stereotypes society tries to subscribe to him for one. A Jewish childhood actor turned rapper from Canada who sings about his feelings? Wait a second, that doesn't fit into any of these neat little boxes we have laying around!

This is bullshit, Drake. If you're gonna rap, then why are you smiling?!

People are uncomfortable with Drake because he doesn't force packaged "hardcore" rap rhetoric into his rhymes, but still frequently expresses himself as a hardcore rapper. The truth is, identity concepts like "hardcore gangsta rapper" don't really, truly exist in society because they are too trivialized to encompass the complexities of human nature. What does it sound like when we criticize a man for being openly vulnerable? What does it mean when a man exhibits a willingness to express feelings and he is met with mockery and insults on his very manhood? It sounds to me like the same old (broken) American system that reduces men to anger and stoicism. And I wanna see some receipts on where that's a positive social move.

A huge part of feminist dialogue is about keeping things female-centered; it can make sense when talking about a system blatantly subordinating woman to want to keep the dialogue focused on female voices and perspectives. However, that doesn't mean we can't look to men as allies. And that doesn't mean we don't need to understand and analyze the male experience as much as we do the female experience.

Everyone has to foster a new environment where we can learn to reward men for expressing their feelings. It is really not a good thing to encourage anyone to repress parts of themselves, and that is effectively what we are doing when we ostracize people who don't adhere to stereotypes or whom fall outside the acceptable social spectrum for a specific role they were externally assigned. That creates psychological issues such as displaced anger. Could it be that a patriarchally run society traps men as much as it traps women? And could it be that maybe- just MAYBE- Drake is bucking some serious stereotypes about what it means to be a man, to be a rapper, to be black- and that it is making some people uncomfortable? Can we allow for real authentic human beings like Drake, whose story is more than a wikipedia page, to exist? Started from the bottom, and now....well, you know the rest.